Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers

Walter Dean Myers has done it again in Lockdown.  He gives his readers a view into the often desperate, definitely depressing world of inner-city youth in poverty-stricken neighborhoods who have little hope of finding a way out except through prison or death.  Yet even in this story of Reese, who is in juvenile detention, we see glimmers of hope and salvation.  Reese is not a black-and-white thug--he is a scared and compassionate young man who endangers himself by standing up for a friend who's being victimized, even knowing that engaging in the fight might get him "graduated" to "upstate."  But when he gets to work in a nursing home instead of being sent to prison, Reese's compassion for others, and hope for himself, blossoms, leaving the reader hoping that Reese makes it.